\section{Joel West}
\label{sec:joelwest}
The interview with Joel West indicates that there were some serious conflicts inside Symbian between the shareholders and directs the analysis into a more concrete direction, which might help to answer the research question. 

\subsection*{Ecosystem Leadership}
As described in the section ``Symbian as an Ecosystem'', Symbian developed three ecosystem strategies: An ad hoc strategy, a Platinum partners strategy and a Symbian partner Network. Wood and West in their paper ``Creating and Evolving an Open Innovation Ecosystems'' describe that the ad hoc strategy was more focused on providing pre-installed software and helping the handset developers. Similarly, the Symbian platinum partners strategy under-valued the ISVs(Independent software vendors) and was more focused on extending more partners. In 2008 Symbian partner network strategy re-emphasized ISVs \citep{WESTWOOD}. This probably has led to:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``Symbians delay in shifting ecosystem support to device creation probably delayed the availability of the first handsets,
while the relative neglect of application vendors after 2002 may have put it at a competitive disadvantage compared to Microsoft and particularly Apple.''} \citep{WESTWOOD}


\end{quote}


\noindent Obviously, Symbian was developed with the core idea of developing an open platform by forming an ecosystem with handset vendors and other complementers, anticipating to have the balance of power in an ecosystem. But there was no balance of power in the ecosystem.
\begin{quote}

\textit{``What we saw was accentually at the time when Symbian was getting market success and should have been riffing the financial rewards at market success by IPO..ing and becoming an independent self funding viable company instead the Nokia basically said no we   don't want you to IPO, so they cancel the IPO.... ''} (Track 3: 10.20 )

\bigskip

\textit{``[...] they went ahead and instituted a new pricing model that only benefited Nokia and so to me that seemed evidence that Nokia was completely in charge [.....]  ''} (Track 3: 12.25)

\bigskip

\textit{``[...] it was quite clear that Symbian model was that they would develop the UIs and that they would maintain the UIs and there is an article in The Register that Symbian had  a UI set aside for Nokia, but they said ``never mind, here's the UI we are using'' and they hadn't told Symbian they were developing it.''} (Track 3: 44.00)

\end{quote}

\noindent These three statements provide the proof about imbalance of power in the platform leadership. This is exactly what Moore describes in the different stages of business ecosystems. When Symbian started to gain some profit and was in the authority stage of the business ecosystem, it should have been able to maintain its bargaining power and maintain its ability to shape future direction. But in fact Symbian was not able to gain as much profit as it should have.  The authority stage is followed by the death stage \citep{Moore}. As West further explains:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``I dramatically noticed was that when the iphone came out, that both Nokia and Symbian were over-confident. Because they were the worlds leading makers, they had the highest market share etc.  but Symbian was less over-confident than Nokia was. so in other words, Symbians attitude was ``you know, they got some pretty good ideas, we probably out to pay some attention to them and respond to that '' and Nokia's response was ``here are the 15 reasons why nobody is going to buy an iphone''.''} (Track 3: 28.36)
\end{quote}

\noindent In this death or renewal stage they should have been more aware of the new rising ecosystem and should have developed some strategies to keep the production process continuous. Instead of coming up with some innovative ideas, Nokia panicked and made the decision to join Microsoft by dropping Symbian (Track 3: 40.52). This clearly illustrates that Symbian and Nokia could not control their power as a leader in the Symbian ecosystem. \bigskip

\noindent West also argues about the fact that there is more control in a vertically integrated ecosystem than in a horizontally integrated one.
 
\begin{quote}

\textit{``In the way, when Apple makes a phone, they don't have the problem because they are like Research in Motion, its all vertically integrated and controlled.''}(Track 3: 23.45)
 
\end{quote}


\subsection*{Conflicting Interests}

\begin{quote}

\textit{``The problem was there were definitely some conflicts of interest. There were definitely some issues or conflict of interest in terms of control of Symbian and [...]. There were conflict over the financial strategy, there were conflict of interest over their platform strategy because different companies control different parts of platform.''} (Track 3: 23.00) 

\end{quote}

\noindent Following Joel West's above mentioned statement and focusing on different available papers, that explain the history and development of Symbian, it is clear that there were different conflicting interests inside Symbian. One of the reason for these conflicts was the control of power in  the Symbian ecosystem leadership. \bigskip

\begin{quote}

\textit{``Certainly, it's very difficult to separate out all the problems with Symbian because the problem is there were conflicts of interest between the partners in the alliance and there were also conflicts of interest between Symbian and it's licensees.''} (Track 3: 8.10)

\end{quote}

\noindent So, basically, Symbian had two responsibilities, as a core ecosystem leader it had to manage the mutual coordination between the partners and as a partner itself, it has to keep mutual understanding with other partners. But this was not the case. \bigskip

\noindent West in his interview describes the conflicting interest regarding the use of UIs. 

\begin{quote}

\textit{``In particular that Ericsson control their layer, UI layer and Nokia control their UI layer and therefore, they were things that probably should have been controlled by Symbian but they wanted to control their own UI layer.''} (Track 3: 23.00)

\end{quote}

\noindent This indicates that Symbian's idea of open platform strategy to set up open standards was undermined by the use of different non-standard user interface by different mobile vendors. In general, the Symbian platform consists of two components: a standard operating system and a customizable UI. The operating system could be partly rewritten to be compatible with different UIs. \citep{HAWKINS} \bigskip 

\noindent Hawkins and Ballon further explain this by saying

\begin{quote}

\textit{``This is an indication that mobile hardware vendors are in effect aiming platform leadership strategies at the non-standard user interface(such as the Symbian 60 series), using the Symbian OS as an open gateway to gather support from third- party applications.''}\citep{HAWKINS}

\bigskip

\textit{``There was a question to how committed all the firms were to the success of Symbian. There was clearly asymmetry and no degree of commitment of the partner.''}(Track 3 : 6.40)

\end{quote}
 From these two statement it can moreover be concluded that there were also different interest regarding the success of the company. Symbian wanted to develop as a successful open platform company, at the same time all the other partners were more focused on their own success.\bigskip
   
\noindent Furthermore, the development of different UIs by different vendors created serious problems in the compatibility within platform. West explains \textit{``this whole system of having handsets UI layers and then operating system imposed some fairly hard coordination problems of making through this''} (Track 3 : 23.45). This can be related to Varian and Shapiro's explanation about compatibility standards, which work as bridges between various technologies and devices. Compatibility between the devices or platforms can expand positive externalities and help to make the network larger, which may lead to creation of de-facto standards\citep[pp.229]{SHAPIRO}. Lack in compatibility within the platform may have hindered third party developers from developing complementary assets.


\subsection*{Innovation Retardation}
The development of smartphones by Symbian can be seen as an open innovation because, for this development different companies were working together and up to some extent there was sharing of knowledge and ideas. The statement from Joel West, \textit{``[...] my most cited work is my papers on open innovations and so they were very interested in developing an open innovation strategy and so they brought me in as consultant to help them develop their open innovation strategy.''} (Track 3: 19:23), makes it clear that Symbian wanted to develop an open innovation strategy.

\begin{quote}

\textit{``They did not actually bring me on, I provide little bit of consulting to their open source strategy which was a bit odd because I would have thought that I would have provided more consulting to that but I guess they were little bit late and well actually no it is not odd because what happened was the person I dealt with was not the person who was making the open source strategy. So, therefore , within the organization, my client did not necessarily had control over the what was happening on open source.''} (Track 3: 20.58)

\end{quote} 
But again the above mentioned statement indicates that imbalance or distribution of power on different levels hindered innovation inside Symbian.

Following the different dimensions of innovation provided by Schilling, it can be clearly seen that the development of the first smartphones by Symbian was a radical innovation followed by incremental innovation. But if we see it from the dimension of competence-enhancing and 

\begin{quote}

\textit{``When Symbian was founded, it faced crucial challenges in building an ecosystem to support its technological innovation. Despite its inheritance from Psion, the new firm would need a new ecosystem. Its managers did not know what sort of ecosystem would be required: like its competitors, it assumed that smartphone ecosystems would be similar to those for PDAs.''} \citep{WESTWOOD2}

\bigskip

\textit{``If you look at what happens inside in the organizations, if you look at the user interface, if you look at the..., if you look at the bugs, you look at heir design skills, it really don't have the software skills. Now, weather that is because they don't hire the right people, weather it's because the people who know about software are not given the authority.''} (Track 3: 24.06)

\end{quote}
These two above cited statements somehow indicate that the Symbian ecosystem was developed on the base of assumption rather than previous knowledge base which also points that the innovation was competence-destroying innovation. Furthermore, the second statement also indicates that the product that was developed in the Symbian ecosystem had some lacking and was not a complete product. Which is also a major factor for crossing the chasm as described by Moore \citep{GMOORE}. 
 
 
As defined by Moore, the major factor for the success of the platforms are applications which are more likely to be championed by end users than by technology professionals that operate the current infrastructure. These applications also can be a success factor for crossing the chasm \citep{GMOORE}. But in the case of Symbian \textit{``[...], the company consistently struggled to allocate sufficient resources to work on software development kits.''}\citep{WESTWOOD}. This too explains that Symbian could not actually utilize its tool and application developers for crossing the chasm.\bigskip
 
\noindent About increasing the market in the US, West explained:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``And there is also related issue that for whatever reason, it was never successful in US. We were expecting it to be successful in US and they had lot of reasons why they expected to be successful in US. So, therefore if it would in fat have been successful in the US than it would have been very different situation. Because that was Motorola's home territory and also it would have made it harder both Research in Motion and Apple and Google too.''}(Track 3 : 17.06)

\end{quote}
  We can compare what Joel West said with what Moore says about crossing the chasm. \textit{``After finding the appropriate niche and being the leader in the market  the next step is to expand into other niches or markets to make it larger''} \citep{GMOORE}. These two statements support the analysis that, if Symbian would have tried to develop the market in US it could have actually created a barrier for new entrants like Apple and Goggle and might have crossed the chasm in the US market. 
  
  
 
\subsection*{Other Relevant Topics}

The validity and the reliability of Joel West's statements are high  because of his contribution to several research papers regarding Symbian, which makes his statements very reproducible. We assess his validity to be high because of his early engagement in Symbian as a consultant for developing an open innovation strategy.\bigskip

\noindent Analyzing the Joel West interview, it can be seen that there were problems regarding ecosystem leadership, financial alignment, share of power and platform development. The other major issues were overconfidence, communication problems and coordination problems. These coordination problems are explained more by following statements:
\begin{quote}

\textit{``[...] if you look today, at what comes out of Nokia, Nokia today is still no confident software company and so therefore I would say that the lack of software confidence was certainly a major problem, but then there were additional coordinational problems on top.''}(Track 3 : 26:38)

\bigskip

\textit{``[...]and the problem was, that when it had to react to unexpected things that outsides were doing, it was slow to react. and basically did not know what to do, and then when it had there was the whole coordination problem it had with Symbian. so overall the Nokia model of being in charge and of driving the industry worked, as long a s Nokia could be insular and controlling things, but when it was not able to do that then it got into difficulties.''}(Track 3 : 28:40)

\end{quote}

\noindent About formation of alliances with partners having asymmetric knowledge, West does not agree with Ancarani and Shankar's perspective that formation of alliance with the partners having symmetric knowledge hinders innovation.\citep{ANCARANI}
In response of this, West argues:
\begin{quote}

\textit{``I mean people don't form alliances for innovation and asymmetry. There is no reason you would form one unless partners have different knowledge basis which it would have and reality is that so many alliances don't last and one of reason said not to last is that the one partner is intending to exploit the other partner and once they have exploited the other partner then they terminate the alliance.''}(Track 3 : 03.05)

\end{quote}
In contrast with this, Ancarani and Shankar explain the alliance formation in Symbian as:
\begin{quote}
\textit{``Symbian can be viewed as a mobile phone company competing in a convergent industry without really converging in terms of resource endowment generated by asymmetric companies. Although Symbian has developed a number of alliances, only a few of them are with mobile telecommunication operators and with
producers of handheld devices. Moreover, no one in the Symbian coalition has really been a champion in the battle for standards''}\citep{ANCARANI}

\end{quote}

\noindent So, according to Ancarani and Shankar, Psion is only a partner with asymmetric knowledge endowment and all the other partners are with symmetric knowledge endowment. They further argue, that alliance formation with similar partners can only lead to sharing of knowledge rather than developing new knowledge.\citep{ANCARANI}
\bigskip

\noindent About standards, West explains that there were not any conflicts or at least major issues regarding  technological standard or inner company standards which were created through fair  processes (Track 3 : 37.46). He further explains that

\begin{quote}

\textit{``We have standards from the point of proprietary standards. And in fact, they are controlling a proprietary platform which is very much what Gawer's text talks about. So, in this regard, the standard serves the same role in coordinating between Symbian and the handset makers or Symbian and the application vendors, as it would if it was a publicly developed standard.'' }(Track 3 : 37.48)

\end{quote} 

\noindent This also implies that standards are not only about technological standards, they are further about the relation  between the members in an ecosystem, their coordination, commitment and so on.
 
